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AFTER the three intensive years at Oxford from 1951 to 1954, my parents and younger sister attended my graduation ceremony. In London afterwards, my father and I got into a bitter argument. He had decided that it was time for me to undertake two years at Wycliffe College, the University of Toronto’s evangelical seminary, to prepare for the Anglican priesthood through theological studies and practical training. I had wanted to take a couple of years off to go to Greenland and work on a fishing boat while exploring how the Danes had treated their Native peoples. All the reports I had ever read had shown that we had so much to learn from them on that, and this remains true today. However, once again I acquiesced to his wishes, and went back to school.

I was quite familiar with the college, having lived in its residence from 1947 to 1951 while taking the arts degree at University College. While seminary is usually pictured by outsiders as a dull or somewhat staid place, for good reason, the moments one seems to remember are the ones that were anything but pietistic or sedate. They appear ridiculously immature now; however, at that time these stunts served a role as sharp relief from the seriousness of studies. Looking back, it’s a wonder that any of us made it to ordination. There were water fights, usually following a “tubbing party” in which victims were rousted from bed in the middle of the night and unceremoniously dumped in a tub of icy water, often creating a cascade of water down the ancient college stairs. One night a student spied an enemy from Trinity College below his window. He dumped a pail of water on the unsuspecting foe, only to find that the innocent man was not a student at all but simply somebody waiting for a friend.

After the rigours of Oxford, the courses at Wycliffe were relatively easy. I was permitted to condense the three-year course into two because of the work I had already done in Greek, philosophy and the history of the ancient Greco-Roman world. Because learning Hellenistic Greek was a major hurdle for most young men entering the Anglican priesthood, I was made a tutor in Greek to most of them and so was able to cover the fees together with room and board. The bishop made me a deacon during my first term and so I was able to assist or stand in for clergy who were sick or otherwise unavailable on weekends. The Varsity rugger squad persuaded me to join in, and after a lengthy search for boots large enough— size 14 or 15, depending on the make—I played with considerable enjoyment. It’s a rough sport and I’m certain that some Sundays the various congregations must have wondered what I’d been doing the night before when I mounted the pulpit covered with bruises and Band-Aids. My preaching, which I would now describe as “evangelical-lite,” seemed popular enough, and overall I found the experience enjoyable and somehow managed to win the prize in Homiletics, or preaching, in my first year.

There are some risks associated with preaching, and I learned early on that communication is a tricky business. Not infrequently a person leaving the church afterwards would comment on how much they enjoyed the sermon and then say how they particularly liked some specific point that was made. The problem was that what they thought you said and what you knew (or believed) you had actually said were sometimes not the same at all. That’s why later on in the ministry I made a habit of stopping the sermon earlier than before and coming down from the pulpit to take questions from parishioners. The “I talk, you listen” version of communication still prevails in many churches today, although in our highly interactive culture that’s about the only place left where this is so. The Internet and the ubiquitous social media now carried in virtually everyone’s purse or pocket have changed the way we communicate forever.

The other danger associated with preaching is much more subtle: the way clergy are seduced by the praise into believing they really are as eloquent and wise or spiritual as their flock would have them believe. There is a great spiritual trap there, and nobody at the college warned about it. Often it’s only recognized after a fall or in some cases disgrace, as in the episodes we’ve witnessed in recent years with a few highly popular American evangelistic preachers.

What really interested me most during the two years of seminary was Biblical studies. Though Wycliffe’s approach to the Bible was ultra-conservative without being actually hard-core fundamentalist—the college motto was Verbum Domini Manet (“The Word of the Lord Remains,” or stands solid)—there was a large, up-to-date library and I knew how to use it to full advantage. So, for the first time I was able to research for myself what contemporary scholars were saying about the Scriptures, and what I discovered was quite a shock. It had already become very apparent from what some of our professors were teaching us that there was a considerable gap between what seminaries teach and what people in the pews are told (although that gap was to be greatly narrowed several decades later with the arrival on the scene of the Internet and search engines such as Google). However, what I began to learn as I read more widely for myself was that there was an even larger lacuna between what our professors were teaching us and the latest scholarship of the day. In other words, Wycliffe wasn’t exactly in the vanguard of critical thinking at that time. I was a little surprised, for example, to find that there isn’t a single teaching in the whole of the Sermon on the Mount that is original. Everything in Matthew chapters 5 to 7, where the Sermon is found, can be matched or found already existing in the Judaism of the time, either in the Old Testament itself or in the Talmud or the Mishnah. Some of the sayings are anticipated in Plato, about four hundred years earlier.

Even more surprising—something that was so cataclysmic in its implications that I deliberately shut it off from full consciousness for many years—was the virtually total dearth of evidence for a historical figure at the centre of Christianity. Because of the fundamentalist “slant” of the overall program, we were never taught to question the Gospels themselves, or the Acts of the Apostles, or the letters attributed to Paul; so it seemed as if there was an abundance of historical material behind Jesus. Certainly the Jesus Story itself had a very long history—but so too had the story of Lucifer! Looking behind the scenes through the eyes of modern critics, I searched in vain for the kind of evidence that my Oxford studies had trained me to watch for: genuinely contemporary eyewitnesses, secular histories, inscriptions, and other archeological artifacts such as busts, coins or artwork of different kinds. This issue would come back to haunt me in future years, but for the time being it had to be repressed. Too much was at stake to venture far into such possibly treacherous waters.

Unfortunately, unless one did as I did and roamed more widely than the courses strictly required, there was little in the seminary experience to kindle either one’s imagination or one’s intellect with any kind of “divine fire” or passion for Christian renewal. I enjoyed the sports, the company of my fellow students and most of the lecturers, especially the principal of the time, the Reverend Dr. Ram-say Armitage, a truly Christian gentleman and a most Christ-like personality. He glowed with a love of God and a love of people. Most especially he glowed with a love of England. “A stout stick and the Sussex Downs,” was his favourite expression, and obviously very close to his idea of heaven. (Once I had been on the South Downs in spring, I knew what he meant.) He is the only person I ever knew who had twice walked the entire length of the Roman wall built by Hadrian to keep the Scots from invading Roman Britain.

When term ended in the spring of 1956, I gave the valedictory address as Senior Student or President of the graduating class. My proud parents were there, together with my two sisters, Elizabeth and Jane, and my brother George. We graduates were ordained to the priesthood in a solemn ceremony at St. James’ Cathedral in May.

The Cree Indians of my student missionary days had no word in their vocabulary for the two crucial stages of becoming a deacon and then a priest of the Church. In both ceremonies, as well as in Confirmation, which all Anglicans receive, the presiding bishop puts his hand on your head as he utters a prayer, using a phrase which in Cree quite literally means “having your head squeezed.” I felt that I had my head squeezed in ordination to the diaconate in 1954 and then again when I was “priested” in 1956 because I felt that I was being “squeezed” to fit a specific mould. I remember being extremely self-conscious as I donned a clerical collar, black stock and sober suit for the first of these ceremonies. I dressed without once looking in a mirror and it was only upon walking along Bloor Street to the ceremony that I first caught sight of my image in a restaurant window. With a sinking feeling, I felt as though I were now part of a sort of “third sex”—cut off from others as a “professional holy man.” It was what I had been planning for and studying for over many years, but the reality gave me a genuine shock. I fervently hoped I was making the right choices. I wanted to serve God and my fellow men, but I honestly didn’t feel very religious per se. I knew what the martyr to Nazism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, meant when he wrote about “the end of religion” in its narrowest sense.

Of course, at that time the ministry was still considered a noble calling and a great deal of respect was paid to clergy. In time I got used to looking different from other people, and even found the collar a help in pastoral care. Contrary to popular mythology, however, it in no way brought me special favours from authority figures. I got more than my fair share of tickets for speeding, illegal parking and other minor traffic sins. The officers were polite: “And where are you going at such a clip, Father?” they would query as they drew out their ticket pad. Then, trying to be funny, “We wouldn’t want you going to your own funeral, now, would we?” Garage mechanics saw the collar as a sign of worldly naïveté and adjusted the bill upwards accordingly. Panhandlers seemed to spot the collar a block away. Drunks were particularly moved by the sight of it and would often embark on a recital of their entire life’s story at the sight of a clerical collar.

The worst part, though, was the way the round collar dampened down the repartee and social ease of ordinary people. The Scottish evangelist Tom Allen once put it like this when describing the effect of a minister’s garb: “When an ordinary chap realizes you’re a clergyman, he ceases to be the man he really is and instantly becomes the man he thinks that you think he ought to be.” They’d apologize for swearing, and tell old jokes about religion, all of which most clergy had heard by six weeks after ordination. At six foot four, I would get a lot of “How’s the weather up there?” and “I didn’t know you were such a High Churchman.”

Once, just before ordination to the Anglican priesthood, the bishop summoned us to a rural centre north of Toronto for a spiritual retreat prior to the ritual on the following Sunday. He was a stickler for upholding the dignity of the cloth, and we were told to bring our full ministerial equipment—surplice and cassock and so on—as well as casual clothes for recreation. I arrived late at the retreat centre, well after the first session had begun. I dumped my suitcase and, dressed in casual slacks with one of my favourite red-and-black-checked open-necked shirts—looking a little like an after-hours lumberjack—raced to the main seminar room. As I entered the room, the bishop was laying down the law about always being sure to wear white shirts with French cuffs and cufflinks underneath our black bibs and Roman collars when on church duties. I squeezed into a chair at the back of the room, trying to avoid his eyes. He abruptly interrupted his colloquy and beckoned me to a seat near him at the very front. As I slunk forward, I saw to my embarrassment that every one of my fellow ordinands was dressed in an official, flowing black cassock and round white collar. I squirmed uncomfortably until the lecture’s end, and then bolted to my room to change. Less than ten minutes later I arrived at the next session dressed in full clerical splendour only to find to my total chagrin that the rest had decided to follow my relaxed example and had changed to casual clothes.

Eventually it was time for the profoundly moving ceremony when we were to be ordained in historic St. James’ Cathedral, in the heart of the city. I had purchased a new and very expensive topcoat for the occasion. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of leaving it over a pew at the rear of the cathedral at the rehearsal the night before, and it was stolen, probably to buy a bottle of cheap wine. The police were cheerful when they said, “It’s an ill wind . . .”

Following ordination in May 1956, I was married the next month to my first wife, Mary, who had been a student at Trinity College across the street from Wycliffe, and three daughters, Elizabeth, Margaret and Mary Catharine, were born over the next seven years. Desperately needing money, I obtained a menial job as a sweeper at the Ontario Exhibition Park for a few weeks as my first posting in the ministry didn’t commence right away. (The only thing I learned there was that general labourers prefer a boss who wears big boots, because then you can hear him coming long before you see him, and thus get busy sweeping.)

My first position was curate of St. John’s York Mills, one of the most affluent and influential parishes in the diocese. As a curate (or junior assistant), my mentor and boss, the Venerable Archdeacon Arthur McCollum, presented me with a leather-bound parish list and said he expected me to make a minimum of five visits every afternoon. To be honest, I found this part of the ministry less than fulfilling. It worked well in rural charges where one could go out to the fields or barn and talk with the menfolk. But in the city, in such a wealthy suburb and at a time when many if not most women didn’t go to work, the lady of the house was usually the one there to greet you. We would make polite conversation about the weather, the children and Sunday school, but it seemed a pale image of the kind of muscular Christianity I thought I had been called to.

This part of the work often left me feeling trapped, and it was sometimes a relief to find nobody was at home. One could then leave a card and tally one more visit in the book. One hot afternoon I knocked on a door and was greeted by a little boy of about four years old. I asked if his mother or father were in, and he said in a bright and chirpy manner, “Come on in,” and ushered me into the living room. I was just about to sit down when a startled pair of eyes peering out through a tangle of wet and still-soapy hair appeared like an apparition from behind a half-open door. Spying my clerical form, the woman gave a sudden cry and shouted at little Ricky to “Show the gentleman out, I’m having a bath!” and slammed the bathroom door. I retreated in a hurry.

The following year, I accepted the position of rector of St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines, West Hill. In 1957 there was just a small chapel and a very sad-looking concrete-block parish hall, but the fourteen-acre setting with its tall, ancient pines and well-kept cemetery was magnificent. The road through the property was part of the old stagecoach route from Toronto to Kingston—the Kingston Road, as its modern successor is still called today. The first church was built in 1832, thirty-five years before Confederation, and the victims of early cholera and other epidemics were said to have been buried along the way, not far from the rectory.

Unlike doctors, until recently most ministers, priests and rabbis still made house calls. In the course at seminary called Pastoralia, we were taught that the typical day should go as follows: sermon preparation and/or hospital visiting in the morning; systematic house-by-house visiting of everyone on the parish rolls in the afternoon; meetings or individual counselling in the evenings. I took over the parish at a time when traditional farmlands and the spread of suburbia were still intermeshed around Toronto. Once, I was visiting a family who lived in an old farmhouse not far from the edge of the Scarborough Bluffs, the cliffs which mark that part of the shore of Lake Ontario. It was a chilly October day and there was a warm fire in the old wood stove. Things looked very cozy and I accepted a cup of tea and biscuits. Just then, a large, elderly dog came in from outside, padded over to me, collapsed at my feet and fell asleep. Unfortunately, the poor animal had recently been in close contact with a skunk, and the heat from the fire on his wet coat made the odour rise like steam from a kettle. Nobody else appeared to notice, but my stomach started to do cartwheels and I knew if I didn’t make a run for it I would soon be sick. I put down the food and drink and beat a hasty retreat. I remember the stunned look on my parishioners’ faces. I didn’t have the courage to tell them the truth. The suit had to be sent to the cleaners twice before it was fit to wear again.

There were always some members of the church who had to be approached with special care. Everyone had warned me that an elderly widow in my first parish, Mrs. Barnfather, could be fierce and that she disliked me sight unseen, on principle, because I was replacing her friend, the previous rector. I very much wanted to make a good impression and win her over to my side. When she opened the door, I realized she was almost as tall as I was, with grey hair pulled into a prim, tight bun on the top of her head. She invited me into her formal parlour and served up tea and fruitcake. She had provided me with a table napkin that I tried to keep on my knee while balancing the cup and saucer and eating a piece of cake. Unfortunately, the napkin kept falling to the floor. To make conversation, I ventured a weak joke. I said, “I wish I had a wooden leg—then I could use a thumbtack to keep this napkin in place.” She glared at me ferociously and replied, “My late husband had a wooden leg, and that’s anything but humorous!” It was to be a long time before we eventually became friends.

Churchgoing was then very much in fashion, and new homes were springing up on all sides in my parish. Soon the church and hall were filled for morning services and the numbers were continuing to grow rapidly. Our congregation decided to build a large new church, as many other growing suburban congregations were doing. Architects were hired, endless planning and fundraising dinners were held, and in the spring of 1960 the cornerstone was laid. The dedication of the completed sanctuary was set for late that fall. In good time, a splendid, lofty building went up, with lots of clear and tinted glass through which the worshippers could still appreciate the natural beauty of their surroundings. The soaring arches inside were of British Columbia fir and the roof was made of cedar shingles. The whole impression was one of woodsiness and airy heights.

The contract for the pulpit, lectern and altar had been let to a craftsman in downtown Toronto—a friend of a key parishioner. He did excellent work, but unfortunately he found it hard to keep to a schedule. As the much-awaited day of dedication of the new church approached with no pulpit in sight, I went to his downtown workshop and was greatly alarmed to find everything in the most elementary form, half buried in piles of shavings. He assured me, however, that everything was proceeding as it should. I tried to smother my fears, but when the day before the event came and went and still there was no altar, lectern or pulpit, I began to panic.

We were expecting several hundred people at the dedication, including local politicians and, in particular, the Lord Bishop of Toronto himself. In the Anglican ceremony of dedication of a church, there are special prayers of consecration to be said over all three items that were still missing. How to explain their absence? I cajoled, pleaded and begged, and the craftsman continued to assure me he would be on time. But when the Bishop arrived for dinner at the rectory on the evening of the affair, there were still no essential furnishings. The Bishop, the Right Reverend Fred Wilkinson, who terrified me at the best of times, had to be told. I took him aside and broke the news. He was quite annoyed. “I suppose you expect me to ask God to bless the altar, pulpit and lectern which one day will be seen here,” he grumbled. I gulped and told him that was about all we could do.

Finally, the service was ready to begin. The church was filled to overflowing and the choir was assembled at the doors to commence the processional hymn. As the sexton tolled the hour and I was in the middle of announcing the opening hymn, there was a roar at the gates of the churchyard and a cloud of dust as an antique truck lurched its way up the drive. It screeched to a stop and the driver, my tardy cabinetmaker, leaped out crying: “Don’t start yet!”

The red-faced Bishop, holding on to his ceremonial shepherd’s crook, curtly gave his permission to delay the proceedings until the contents of the battered truck were brought in. The altar came first, in four pieces, and had to be assembled up at the front while the packed congregation looked on in astonishment. Next came the pulpit. It seemed enormous and looked more like a chariot from Ben-Hur than an ecclesiastical podium. The maker and four men and I had all we could do to carry it up the aisle. Since it wouldn’t fit in the aisle, it had to be carried waist-high above the pews on either side. While we struggled with it, my accountant, who was also the insurer of the property, rushed up to say that he would not accept liability if the pulpit were to tip and fall on anyone. So an announcement was made and people scurried for cover or scrunched up together, and we struggled on. The craftsman, who was carrying some of the weight on his shoulders and dropping wood shavings all over the new carpet, was nearly crushed when we finally set it down too quickly.

When my former “boss,” the Archdeacon of York Mills, the Venerable A.C. McCollum, eventually climbed into the pulpit and launched into his sermon, he began, “I can’t tell you what a privilege it is to be the first person ever to preach from this pulpit. What’s more, I’m certain I’m the first because I saw it come down the aisle with my own eyes!” Afterwards, some people told me that it was the most dramatic church service they had ever attended, and others said they thought I had staged the whole thing for effect! This is one of the moments in my life that would be done differently if I had another chance.

Christmas in the 1950s and 1960s, while the source of a certain delight, was also a season of utter exhaustion for the ministry. There was private communion to be taken to the sick, children’s concerts to be endured, gift and food boxes to be delivered to the poor, and extra sermons to be given. After several years had passed, it became almost impossible to say anything new on the subject, I found.

On the afternoon of December 24, 1959, I was almost dropping in my tracks from weariness. Earlier that day I had delivered a box containing a large turkey and trimmings, with toys for the children, to a “needy” family who lived in a high-rise apartment building. The elevator wasn’t working and I had to carry the package up several flights of stairs. I rang the doorbell, and after an eternity a child of about five opened the door. The living room was dominated by a huge colour TV set going full blast, which made my little black-and-white one at home seem like a relic. “I’ve come with gifts from St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines Church,” I said. The father of the house, who was reclining on a sofa with his head propped on pillows watching I Love Lucy, looked irritated and said, motioning with a casual wave, “Put it over there,” indicating a table in the corner. This little encounter didn’t do much to put me in the right frame of mind to deliver my midnight sermon that evening, entitled “Sharing as the Essence of Christmastide.”

I spent the rest of that afternoon pacing the church grounds with my pipe (my crutch at that time) and trying to think, but by suppertime nothing had really gelled, and I also learned that my organist had suddenly come down with the flu. By nine-thirty I had an outline in my head and headed over to the office to type out my notes. I threw my coat over one of the benches (we were using the parish hall until the new church was ready), and at about ten o’clock I added the final touches to my sermon. Then I smelled smoke. I dashed down the stairs three at a time and into the hall and stood there, transfixed with shock, as flames leapt five feet high from my overcoat and the bench, which was also on fire. I realized I must have forgotten to empty my pipe of its ashes before putting it into my pocket. Fortunately, a rush of adrenalin freed me from my immobility, and after several pails of water I had the fire out, but it left the hall completely filled with clouds of acrid, choking black smoke. The service was due to begin in less than an hour. I tore around, opening as many windows as I could, and to my relief blasts of freezing air soon cleared most of the haze. But the place simply stank of burned cloth and paint, and by now it seemed to be bordering on too cold to serve as a church. I felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown! I ran for my car, drove to the nearest convenience store and purchased several cans of air freshener, drove back, closed the windows and furiously sprayed in all directions.

By the time the congregation began to arrive, there was the oddest scent in the air, but nobody remarked on it.

Preaching is either a clergyman’s greatest delight or the one thing that can keep him tossing at night like a harpooned fish. At that time, sermons were prepared with great diligence in an effort to impart something original and inspiring. Usually I enjoyed it, but there were times when I would have given anything for a copy of a medieval collection of prepared sermons aptly titled Dormi Securi (“sleep without a worry in your head”), reportedly much used by clerics of that feisty period in Church history. Interestingly, the Internet has enabled some clerics today to use generic sermons. They’re easy to spot because they invariably conclude with a question: “How would you [pointing a finger at a sweep of pews] respond to such a commandment today?”

Soon after I was ordained a deacon and during my first year of theological training, I was sent on weekends to a country charge with three churches. All the services were in the morning, beginning with the farthest point at nine o’clock, where I did a “preach and run” and then moved on to the next and the next in order to get everyone home for their Sunday dinner at one p.m. My very first morning was a beautiful, sunny fall day that was so warm all the windows in the little rural church were wide open. I mounted the pulpit feeling confident, apart from a certain tension I always had while gazing down into such trusting eyes. It was a harvest home service and the oaken pews were crammed with families, including the front rows, a rare phenomenon in Anglican churches even then.

Unfortunately, I got off to a rather shaky start. There was a banner attached to the reading stand on the pulpit by a piece of elasticized ribbon. As I gave the opening prayer, I inadvertently toyed with the ribbon. I said, “Amen,” looked up to announce my text, accidentally freed the elastic, and with a whoosh the banner shot into the lap of a matronly woman wearing a straw hat. She stared at me as if I had done it on purpose. I apologized and waded into the homily, but found it hard to keep up the enthusiastic momentum my notes called for. As I laboured on, the congregation took on that fixed, glazed look of those whose minds have wandered far away. Then an extraordinary thing happened. A sudden, quirky gust of wind came in the window, lifted the paper with my sermon notes on it and gently wafted it outside, where it tumbled like a falling leaf to the lawn below.

Now the congregation came to life and started to look interested for the first time. I did my best to smile and, putting a look on my face that I hoped would show I was better off without the notes anyway, tried to improvise. It was a losing battle until I suddenly remembered my concluding points. I seized on them like a drowning man and worked and reworked them until I had successfully filled the remaining ten minutes.

Afterwards, several parishioners told me they had enjoyed such an “interesting” sermon, but I knew that “roast parson” would be the main course at Sunday dinner in more than one home that day.

“The cure of souls” is an old-fashioned way of speaking about ministering to people’s spiritual needs. A good deal of time in the parish was spent presiding over the rites of passage of funerals and weddings, and administering the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion. During the course of my ministry I had, like all clergy, to face human tragedy and sorrow times without number. I found it a tremendous privilege and responsibility to be admitted into the tender arena of grief and attempt to bring comfort, renewed courage and hope. There can be no point at which a minister comes closer to people, who are very often today total strangers to him or her, than when a death occurs.

The one thing I tried to avoid at all costs was the habit of some overzealous clerics of seizing the occasion of a funeral, where one has a captive audience, as an opportunity to preach to the “unsaved.” It still goes on today and has always seemed to me an unfair tactic. Words of comfort—yes, of course, but anything more is not truly compassionate. My very first funeral was that of a three-year-old. She was a little girl, the joy of her parents and grandparents, who lived on a farm together at the edge of town. The only grandchild, she was tragically run over by the grandfather’s tractor one morning as she ran to him unaware that he was going to back out of a nearby shed. Everyone was devastated and my heart was particularly touched to the depths by the plight of the old man. He was utterly inconsolable. I visited him and his wife, as well as the young parents, several times before the funeral—mostly just to be with them, saying very little, except to try to assure them of the presence and love of the Eternal always with and within them and their darling little one. At the service I studiously stayed away from syrupy truisms or the, to my mind, wholly misleading pronouncements often heard at such events as people try to make sense of the incomprehensible, to the effect that “God took her because he needed her in heaven” or “She was too good for this world.” But it was very difficult, even at times exhausting work, if you really loved your people.

So close a walk with death and dying takes its toll on many ministers and priests. If not for the ability to receive the gift of humour, most clergy would find it impossible to continue. You could even, with no disrespect, call it “putting the fun back in funerals.” Often I found that when hearing about amusing things the deceased person said or did, the bereaved may begin to sense that healing is taking place. This was especially true when the deceased was on in years and had lived a full life. In the midst of the saddest funerals, I sometimes found my own spirits start to lift, for example, at the incongruity of the professional grief of the undertaker and his staff in their mourning clothes or the syrupy and sentimental funeral chapel hymns.

Once, I was conducting a funeral in mid-winter. I felt I looked rather resplendent in my new floor-length black funeral cloak, which was designed to ward off the chill that only cemeteries in winter provide. However, as I strode by a group of mourners, a young lad of about eight pointed at me and, tugging at his mother’s arm, said: “Look, Mum, it’s Zorro!” It helped my humility, but it did more—it introduced a note of laughter and saved an otherwise very bleak day. I was reminded of Robert Frost’s poem “Dust of Snow,” about being in the woods on a depressing winter’s day. He wrote that the way a crow in a hemlock tree shook down a dusting of snow on him lifted his mood and “saved some part of a day I had rued.”

Weddings are usually a pleasant part of any minister’s duties. It’s a privilege to be close to a couple at such a key existential moment. The pitfalls are many, however. Often I would find that the reception hall, flowers, rented tuxedos and even the wedding cake had all been booked and partially paid for long before I was asked if the church and I would be free and willing on a particular Saturday in June. Being the busiest month of all for weddings, compromise was often necessary.

The media got involved at the first wedding I performed after receiving my licence as a newly ordained deacon. It was my sister Elizabeth’s wedding, and it was a tasteful ceremony carried out at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Churchill, Ontario, where I was serving a summer charge. I was mortified, however, to pick up a copy of a Toronto daily (the now-defunct Toronto Telegram) the following Monday and read a report under the heading BROTHER MARRIES SISTER.

During my last summer at Big Trout Lake in 1950, on one occasion the groom failed to show up at his wedding. The missionary, Rev. Leslie Garrett, had told me to be sure to come because it was to be a double wedding and there would be a colourful send-off at the end when all the men of the band would line up on either side of the path as the couples left the church and fire their shotguns off into the sky in a grand salute. Frankly, I was a little nervous about this part of the celebrations because, for people who lived most of their lives by hunting, these particular Cree seemed very unlucky in the number of injuries they did both to themselves and to others through accidental discharges of their weapons. But I resolved to go anyway.

Two brides showed up, but only one groom. We waited for at least a half-hour, and in the end I felt so sorry for the woman without a man that I would have liked to volunteer one of the other young men present. At last someone was sent to find out what had happened to the missing man. It turned out he had fallen asleep and forgotten that the event was set for that afternoon. He was too chagrined and ashamed to show his face that day, and his girlfriend was asked to sit down while the other bride was married. Most girls would have been insulted to the point of rejecting such a sleepy suitor entirely, but the pair were married the following Saturday. I’m happy to report that no one was injured when the shotguns finally were fired for them.

The Anglican service of baptism, intended mainly for infants of very tender age—the Book of Common Prayer actually says “as soon as possible after birth”—always has as its Gospel reading the passage where Jesus bids the disciples to “suffer the little children to come unto me.” Although church attendance today has suffered dramatic declines, for very good reasons, many young parents still want the traditional baptism for their babies. The principle seems to be that once the baby has had all its shots against temporal diseases, it should then be inoculated against any possible spiritual harm. Ironically, the process for many years now seems to have served as an immunization against ever catching Christianity. Of course, the other motivation is the family party afterwards, or it may simply be done to please the doting grandparents.

One morning around 1960, as a consequence of the flood of newcomers taking up residence in the West Hill region, the parents of sixteen children came for the sacrament of baptism. Their many relatives and friends added significantly to the already large regular congregation. Several of the more influential parishioners glared at me when I first came in because they had been forced out of their usual pews by the invasion of these strangers. As I strode into the centre aisle to begin the various prayers for the “remission of sin by spiritual regeneration” of the assorted babies and toddlers before me, one three-year-old decided to make a break for it, running down the centre aisle with his father in hot pursuit.

The escapee was returned, but not without howls of outrage. This unfortunately made the rest of the baptizands apprehensive that something might be lurking ahead to cause them pain. The first set of parents approached the font and handed me their baby while holding their other toddler by the hand. Normally I never had any trouble with small babies, holding them very firmly in one arm the way we were taught to do, and pouring a small amount of tepid water on the forehead with the other hand. This baby, however, yelled bloody murder the moment I took him. I tried the usual technique: smile sweetly at the baby, speak as loudly as possible and give it back as swiftly as you can while not looking too relieved. Now it was his older brother’s turn, and I made the mistake of picking the child up, trying to handle him as one would an oversized infant. He screamed and struggled, delivering some very energetic kicks to my midsection. The entire group of little ones had now joined in and begun wailing loudly.

By the time I had fought my way through the entire batch, I was soaked, my preaching scarf was hanging askew, and my patience had almost given way to something else. I then needed to deliver the sermon, repeating the passages about childhood innocence I had so unsuspectingly prepared the night before.

Later that afternoon I was having a brief nap when I was awakened by a phone call from a woman I had never heard of or met asking whether she and her husband could have their baby “done” soon. In weariness I couldn’t help myself and said, “And how would you like it done, madam? Well, medium or rare?” She hung up at once.

Those who have read Water into Wine will know something of my own understanding of what baptism actually means and how it can be seen as so much more than a churchy ritual of convenience. Were I to be back in a parish today, I would present it quite differently than in that bygone era. One thing is certain: there would be a great deal less said about sin and much more about the acknowledgement of the presence of the divine spark in every newborn child of God.

Certainly the most sacred service for most Christians is the Eucharist, also known as the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion or Mass. The risks for clergy are many: losing one’s place in the prayer book, dropping the chalice, or running out of bread and wine. One morning at St. Anne’s Church in the heart of Toronto, I nearly electrocuted a parishioner. I had walked across the carpet of the chancel area several times and had unknowingly picked up an impressive charge of static electricity. I learned later that I should have discharged it by touching the metal radiator before handing the cup to anyone. Not knowing this, however, I blithely offered the cup to the first gentleman on his knees, and watched as a spark leapt between the cup and his lip. It was audible to the entire group kneeling at the altar rail, and badly frightened the poor man as well as myself.

One thing you are taught as an Anglican minister is that any bread or wine which has been consecrated for Holy Communion and has not been used must be consumed by the clergy at the close of the service. In order not to run out, I would frequently overestimate the size of the crowd and have quite a lot to deal with at the end. My father, when he had his own parish in his late-in-life career as an Anglican parish priest, had his own ideas about leftover bread: he would simply throw it out on the lawn for the birds well after the service, believing it did more good that way. Eating leftover bread or wafers is one thing, and can be at times an embarrassment, but drinking any remaining wine after the chalice has been passed around to two hundred or more people and contains small wet crumbs from the bread the communicants missed is enough to make a person gag. This practice is seldom thoroughly discussed or even mentioned anywhere. Fortunately for the clergy, the practice of drinking from the common cup has changed somewhat in this day and age of fears of pandemics, but it is still a contentious issue in some parishes.

Outwardly, it appeared at that time as if my parish career was proceeding just as it should. All the external marks of success were in place. St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines was one of the few parishes in the diocese that had more men than women in the pews on any given Sunday morning. Inwardly, however, trouble was fermenting. Issues were arising, both theological and personal, that one day would have to be squarely faced.

Sometimes I am asked whether I would like to be back in a parish ministry today and, if so, what I would do differently. A full answer would again require a book-length treatise, but a few points can sketch at least a general direction. If possible, I would simultaneously have a teaching or writing post so that my preaching and teaching could be quite financially independent. Put bluntly, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to speak out freely from a pulpit when those who pay the bulk of your salary and the church maintenance fees are sitting in the front row each Sunday. I would also initiate a parallel church for agnostics, atheists and seekers of every kind. There would be no formal prayers, sermons or lectures at such a gathering. Rather, it would be a place and time for honest questioning and debate.

My understanding and experience of prayer have evolved gradually in the process of living in the real world and not that of the cloister or the seminary. Whereas, like most people, I once prayed as though God were indeed some super-parent in the sky with a switchboard dedicated to my plaintive demands, I slowly matured through various stages to a point where prayer is most often not verbalized at all. I still believe in clearly stating my fears, uncertainties and doubts as well as my joys and gratitude, either silently or aloud (when alone), because God is everywhere throughout the cosmos and we live constantly with that Presence about us and within. This wish to put things into words is not based on some assumption that my wants or joys are unknown to the Deity, but on my need to express them and on what this does for others and for me. I speak of what I know. Prayer has power, but according to universal spiritual laws, not because God needs to hear either our whimpering or our praise. The best prayer for me—and for millions around the world of all religions or of none—is that of pure silence. Sometimes one wants to meditate by using a simple mantra while calmly observing the breath moving in and out. At times I simply repeat a verse of Scripture or of sublime poetry. For example, the word Amen can itself become a mantra. Or the verse “We have not received the spirit of fear but of power, of love and of a sound mind.” In the end, I have found that I pray because I must express my thanks for being alive and all that means. We are wired to pray, but the puerile “bless me, bless me” days of one’s childhood need to disappear.

In the “parallel church” there might be readings, not just from Holy Scriptures (of various faiths) but from so-called secular writers, poets and journalists. The music would be as varied as the “congregation” decided. There would be a wide use of modern media in a spectrum of presentations—and always with time for feedback or discussion. When I was at St. Margaret’s, I wrote an entire Sunday school curriculum based upon a series of major films dramatizing the life of St. Paul. The teachers and children loved it. In parish ministry, as everywhere else in religion, it is time for some truly radical change.

Harvest home and Thanksgiving would not be the only occasions where our total dependency on and “interbeing” (to use a Buddhist term) with the whole of the natural world would be acknowledged and made the focus of prayer, readings and meditation. One thing I have learned from my own experience as well as from my research into pre-Christian or Pagan beliefs is the centrality of the Creation to a full and balanced spirituality. When the early Christians gained temporal power through the conversion of Emperor Constantine and then gradually proceeded to denigrate and destroy all that Paganism held dear, they turned away from the deep connection religion had always had with Mother Earth and the cycles of the cosmos at the same time. Literalism too played its part, as the whole myth about God cursing the earth and Adam’s destiny in it was read as a fact of history. Part of the vast environmental crisis we face right now is due to the Western world’s inheritance of an attitude towards nature of negativity and indifference. You can find it even in the hymns we sing in church. “Joy to the World,” one of the best-known of all Christmas carols, for example, in stanza three celebrates belief in the “Curse of Adam” upon what we call “the environment.” The verse says in part, “far as the curse is found,” and repeats it three times for emphasis. At best the natural world is regarded as there to be exploited and used as we see fit. All religions need to rediscover the reverence and awe that link us once again to the womb out of which we come and that nourishes our inner spirit as nothing else can.

On my eightieth birthday we had the great privilege of visiting Zion Canyon National Park in southwestern Utah. Our hiking path through the valley followed the Virgin River, alongside the canyon heights, which were named by the early Mormon settlers as the Altar of Sacrifice and the Thrones of the Three Patriarchs. As we stood and gazed mutely at the soaring rock walls, I had a deeper, more awesome awareness of the reality and the power of the presence of God than I had ever known before or have experienced since in any cathedral or in the presence of even some of the holiest personalities I have met. Lorne Greene, the famous Canadian TV personality, put it very simply but perhaps best in his recording of the song “Oh, the place where I worship, is the wide open spaces, built by the hand of the Lord.” Many millions today can say amen to that.